He was in his pavilion, sweeping his sensing-organ from side to side in broad arcs. Casting his mind outward along it into the great empty spaces that surrounded Yissou, he trawled southward for news. On the far side of the wall, the whole city’s width away, stood his son Biterulve, seeking word from the north.
The new communications network was finally in place. It had taken all the winter to build it: finding the volunteers, training them, sending them out to establish the outposts that would masquerade as farms. But now he had his agents strung like beads along a line stretching southward nearly to the City of Dawinno, and north toward hjjk territory as far as seemed safe to intrude.
From all sides came the buzz and crackle of second-sight visions flooding toward him, relayed station by station along the line. The king concentrated the full force of his powerful mind on them. He came here every day at dawn now, to listen, to wait.
It wasn’t easy to achieve, this mind-transmission. The messages were always blurred and difficult to interpret, and often ambiguous. But what other way was there, short of having couriers ride constantly back and forth? At best the news they brought would be weeks late. That was unthinkable, now. Events were moving too quickly. If he had a Wonderstone as Hresh did, perhaps he could let his spirit rove hither and yon as he wished, peering into anything and everything. But there was only one Wonderstone, and Hresh had it.
Nothing was working for him today, though. The messages that were coming in were worthless, murk and mist, darkness and fog, no clarity at all. A waste of time and energy.
Well, so be it. Salaman let his weary sensing-organ go limp. A better day tomorrow, perhaps. He moved toward the stairs.
Then, like an agitated voice calling to him out of the sky, the presence of his son came to him.
— Father! Father!
— Biterulve?
— Father, can you hear me? It’s Biterulve!
— I hear you, yes.
— Father?
— Tell me, boy. Tell me!
There was silence then. Salaman felt fury rising. Plainly the boy had something important to tell him; but just as plainly, Biterulve’s messages and his own replies weren’t in coordination.
Salaman swung around and inclined his sensing-organ toward the direction Biterulve’s output was coming from. It was maddening: so inexact, so imprecise, mere approximations of meaning, images and sensations rather than words, which must be deciphered, which must be interpreted. But certainly there was news from the north. Salaman had no doubt of that. He could feel the boy’s unmistakable excitement.
— Biterulve?
— Father! Father!
— I hear you. Tell me what it is.
He sensed the boy struggling. Biterulve had great sensitivity, but it was of an odd kind, more keen over long distances than close at hand. Salaman hammered his fists against the brick walkway of the wall. He raised his sensing-organ until it could go no higher, and stroked the air with his outspread arms as though that way he could pull the message more clearly from his son.
Then came an image unquestionable in its clarity.
Bloodied bodies lying on a plain between two streams. Hundreds of them. Zechtior Lukin’s people.
Gaunt shadowy figures stalking among them, stooping now and then as though taking trophies.
Hjjks.
— They’re dead, father. The Acknowledgers. Every one of them. Can you hear me?
— I hear you, boy.
— Father? Father? It came through so clearly, through the northern relay posts. They’ve all been killed, in the hjjk country, in a place where rivers fork. All the Acknowledgers, completely wiped out.
Salaman nodded, as though Biterulve were standing right beside him. With a fierce burst of mental strength he hurled toward the boy a message so vehement that he was certain it would get through, to say that he had received and comprehended the news; and after a moment came confirmation from Biterulve, and the boy’s relief that he had managed to make himself understood.
At last, Salaman thought.
Now the wheels begin to turn.
The Acknowledgers had found the martyrdom they wanted. Time now to send the second force, the army of vengeance, which would probably meet martyrdom too, though far less calmly. And then to make ready for the all-out war that was sure to follow.
The king swung about again toward the south. For a moment he stood resting, breathing easily, gathering force. There could be no ambiguities or mysteries this time. The message had to travel along the relay chain with no distortion whatever, and get through to Thu-Kimnibol in distant Dawinno untainted by error.
He summoned the images. The bodies by the riverbank. The dark angular shapes moving among them. The new army, setting out from Yissou, bravely marching into the territory of the enemy to avenge the murder of Zechtior Lukin and his people. The violent collision of forces that was sure to come. The hjjks, aroused, issuing threats.
And then the gates of Dawinno opening, and an immense force of warriors emerging, with Thu-Kimnibol at their head.
Salaman smiled. He raised his sensing-organ and held it rigid. Power throbbed in it from the base of his spine and traveled to the tip. He closed his eyes and let the word burst forth from him. It soared southward from station to station in a bright blaze of energy, like a thunderbolt leaping across the vast spaces between the two cities.
— I invoke the terms of our alliance. We are at war.
Something is wrong. Nialli Apuilana, alone in her room in the House of Nakhaba, feels a sudden tremor, a heaving and a wrenching, as if the world has been pulled free of its base and is plummeting wildly through the heavens. She goes to the window. Everything seems quiet in the streets. But her second sight shows her the sun, suddenly huge, hanging just above her in the air with rivers of blood dripping down from it. In the blackness of the sky the icy green tails of comets whirl and spin.
She trembles and looks away and covers her eyes with her arms. After a time she prays, first to the Five, and then to the spirit of Kundalimon. And then, without knowing why, she thinks to reach out to the Queen as well.
Taking the hjjk star from its place on the wall, Nialli Apuilana holds it before her face, gripping it lightly by its sides. She peers into the open place at its center, narrowing the focus of her vision down until that small open place is the only thing she can see.
It is dark in there. Perhaps some sort of image lurks in the deepest part of the darkness, but she isn’t at all sure it is there, and, if it is, it is blurred and faded and unclear, a mere ghost of a ghost. Once the star had been able to show her the Nest, or so she had thought. But now—
Nothing. Only dark hazy shadows that elude her gaze, try as she might to penetrate them. Of the Nest there is no trace.
Where has it gone? she wonders.
Was it ever there at all?
— Do you want to see?a voice within her asks.
— Yes.
— What you see may change you.
— I’ve been changed so many times already. What harm can one more do?
— Very well. See, then, what is there to be seen.
It seems to her then that the shadows are lifting, that the darkness at the core of the star is brightening, that once more she can look through the place at the center of the star into the familiar subterranean corridors that had for a time been her home. Figures are moving about. She grips the star more tightly, stares more intently.
Figures, yes—
She sees them all too clearly now.
Monstrous. Weird. Distorted, heads like hatchets, arms like swords. Huge cold burning eyes like mirrors of black glass that throw back a thousand malevolent refractory images at once. Glistening beaks that snap and clack and thrust themselves like daggers at her through the opening in the star. Nialli Apuilana hears the harsh hissing sound of their mocking laughter. The star itself, that simple thing of plaited grass, is covered with sharp black bristles now. Its center is a dark hairy mouth, gleaming, gaping, a wet and slippery hole that makes soft insinuating sucking noises at her.